According to IDC, by the year 2022, half of the Asia Pacific’s economies will have been digitalized. This means we are now at the inception of one of the biggest migrations in history, as organizations recreate new and existing processes in the digital realm.

DCIG recently updated its research into enterprise storage and has begun working on reports covering the high-end storage array segment of the marketplace. As we looked at the results and spoke with vendors, it became clear that several recent advances in storage technology are redefining the high-end.

NVMe drives are a big deal in computer storage right now, and for good reason. Not only does an NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) leave most older SSDs in the dust, it’s also blazing fast compared to standard 3.5- and 2.5-inch drives.

As traditional hard drives are being slowly but surely replaced by flash-based SSDs and become more mainstream, the SATA transfer protocol is no longer sufficient to deliver the speeds required for businesses to get the most out of their SSD storage investments.

Data is everywhere and must land somewhere. Somewhere, every bit of data that is created inhabits a piece of IT hardware: a storage array, a cloud service server, a desktop storage device, a deep freeze-like digital archive.

Storage at the edge used to be about ensuring remote offices and transient staff had adequate ways to capture and retain the data they generated. Today, IoT devices have changed all that, generating huge amounts of data while often having limited connectivity.

There’s always an adoption curve when it comes to new technologies. In today’s digital landscape, where industries are constantly being disrupted by new applications and use cases driven by IoT, machine learning, AI, and analytics, those not on the NVMe™ adoption curve may get left behind.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) at scale raises the bar for storage infrastructure in terms of capacity and performance. It is not uncommon for an AI or machine learning (ML) environment to expect growth to dozens if not hundreds of terabytes of capacity. Despite what vendors that only offer all-flash arrays might claim, these environments are simply too large to be stored on only one tier of all-flash.

Enterprise storage demand is growing due to the increasing amount of data generated by IoT, artificial intelligence (AI) and other big data applications. The introduction of advanced wireless networks, such as 5G will increase the need for storage, not only at the data center, but also at the edge and in endpoints.

This will be the second in our set of three blogs about projections for the digital storage and memory industry for 2020 (the start of a new decade). Our last blog dealt with magnetic storage. This one will focus on the current state and projections for solid state storage and memory.

Technology rarely has “a year.” In most cases, what is that technology’s year is the accumulation of previous years’ worth of work until one year pushes the technology over the top in terms of adoption. With that admission, 2020 will be the year for Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabric (NVMe-oF), even though it has been several years in the making.

Media and entertainment content is growing in size due to higher resolution, higher frame rates and more bits per pixel. In addition, the amount of digital content is growing as increasing numbers of creators provide unique content for online streaming channels and as the number of cameras used in a given project increases for applications such as sports 360-degree immersive video projects.

With near-constant change in data center technologies, it’s often difficult to separate incremental innovation from a once-in-a-decade sea change. The new NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) protocol, its use in NVMe solid state drives (SSDs, sometimes referred to as “flash”) and its ability to be used over a network (NVMe over Fabrics) is the latter.

For decades, storage technology progress was measured primarily in terms of capacity and speed. No longer. In recent times, those steadfast benchmarks have been augmented, and even superseded, by sophisticated new technologies and methodologies that make storage smarter, more flexible and easier to manage.

With the traditional spinning-disk hard drive going the way of vinyl, tape cassettes and even the compact disc, NVMe flash storage is set to take over as the enterprise storage format of choice – at least for performance-hungry operations.

NVMe started out as a host controller interface designed to quickly transfer data between a host computer and a target SSD using a PCIe bus. The goal was to cut latency, improve performance, provide parallel I/O and maybe even reduce power consumption, among other NVMe storage benefits. But the technology has evolved into much more.

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications are inherently data-intensive, with multiple reads and writes to the file system. And, at the outset, the AI algorithm absorbs tremendous amounts of training data as it learns the parameters of its job.

We’re on the eve of Flash Memory Summit 2019, an event that will talk about Flash storage products and applications. At the core of the discussion is NVMe, Non-Volatile Memory Express. Without sounding too clichéd, 2019 looks to be the year of NVMe, as the technology moves to become the leading storage protocol for the enterprise.

NVM Express Inc., the developer of the NVMe spec for enterprise SSDs, announced that its NVMe-oF architecture has entered a final 45-day review, an important step toward release of a formal specification for enterprise SSD makers.

For a long time, people in the IT space took storage for granted. That’s because drive companies continued to squeeze more capacity into less space and reduce cost per gigabyte. Responding to that, users learned that storage was cheap and essentially limitless. They adjusted their behavior accordingly by saving everything. That strategy no longer works. Non-volatile memory express (NVMe/TCP) can help.

Hollywood has its fair share of name dropping. But have you heard the latest four-letter word in M&E: NVMe? NVMe is the new kid on the block for accessing high-speed next-gen SSDs that store huge volumes of media content.

The demand for more IT resource-intensive applications has significantly increased today, whether it is to process quicker transactions, gain real-time insight, crunch big data sets, or to meet customer expectations.

It’s quite a mouthful, but Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) is shaping up to become perhaps the most disruptive data center storage technology since the introduction of solid-state drives (SSD), promising to bring new levels of performance and economy to rapidly expanding storage arrays.

Data is being created everywhere, by everyone, all around us, all the time – from everyday activity like email, text and other communication – to creating photos and videos on our personal devices – to IoT like smart fridges, pedometers and cars – to business applications like banking, healthcare and manufacturing – the list is absolutely endless.

Storage technology has evolved by leaps and bounds since the dawn of the computer age. Today’s leap forward is NVMe, a storage system that promises to exponentially increase the bandwidth available to storage devices.

Failing to use the right type of NVMe for a particular application — or deploying the correct technology in the wrong way — can lead to performance problems and needless additional costs, not to mention a great deal of aggravation. Fortunately, most common NVMe storage errors can be avoided by doing some advance research.

Whether it is the aesthetics of the iPhone or a work of art like Monet’s ‘Water Lillies’, simplicity is often a very attractive trait… The Non-Volatile Memory over PCIe Express (NVMe) technology that is now driving the progression of data storage is another place where the value of simplicity is starting to be recognized, in particular with the advent of the NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) topology that is just about to start seeing deployment.

Disaggregated storage has become the norm in large-scale infrastructure and we expect that in 2019 those who are pushing the limits with NVMe will have quite a successful year—vendors as well as their hyperscale and high performance computing users.

This is the second in our three-part 2019 digital storage projection blog series. This part looks at 2018 trends and future developments in solid state storage, memory and fundamental computer architectures.

You know you’ve made it when you get your own show. The fact that there’s a show dedicated to NVM Express (NVMe) next month solidifies an industry-wide sentiment that the host controller interface and storage protocol hit a tipping point in the last year.

As adoption of solid-state drives (SSDs) increases in enterprise, professional, and consumer markets, the practice of shimming flash memory onto interfaces and form factors designed for traditional mechanical hard drives for the sake of cross-compatibility is falling out of style.

It’s no surprise that NVMe speed is impressive: A blue-ribbon consortium of storage and server vendors developed NVMe as a high-performance interface specification that accelerates NAND SSDs using the PCIe bus.

Women who have been involved in the annual Flash Memory Summit (FMS) started Superwomen in Flash networking events four years ago to promote and celebrate the success of women in the memory/storage industry, and with the goal of encouraging more women to enter and succeed in the storage industry.

The nonvolatile memory express specification, developed to maximize the benefits of flash-based storage, has evolved quickly and significantly since it was a gleam in the storage industry’s eyes in the mid-2000s.

IBM has an answer for some of the biggest trends in enterprise data storage – including Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), artificial intelligence, multi-cloud environments and containers – and it comes in a 2U package.

This week, Industry Outlook asks David Woolf, Senior Engineer of Datacenter Technologies at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), about NVMe and NVMe-oF and their role in storage and the data center.

When it comes to storage, this new year certainly won’t be boring. A number of technologies and market movements have been percolating over the past few years and will reach full steam in 2018—impacting the landscape for enterprise suppliers and enterprise buyers alike.

Following on the heels of a major specification update and its eighth annual plug fest, NVM Express is poised to have a busy year as it continues to develop the base NVMe specification while expanding the NVMe Management Interface (NVMe-MI) specification and one for accessing SSDs on a PCIe bus over fabrics.

The storage industry was on a roller coaster in 2017, with the decline of traditional SAN gear offset by enterprise interest in hyperconverged infrastructure, software-only solutions, and solid-state drives.

Five years ago, flash technology transformed the storage market forever. Today, flash-first arrays are the new normal. Will a new shared storage access protocol called nonvolatile memory express over fabrics combined with the advent of storage class memory prove as disruptive to traditional storage over the next five years as NAND flash technology was in the recent past?

As the sun sets on 2017 — and rises over 2018 — we once again present the technologies and trends in data storage that we think will shine brightest and have the most sway over data centers in the coming year. It’s time for Hot Techs 2018!

Hyperconvergence is on a roll. Enterprises are shifting storage investments from legacy architectures to software-defined systems in an effort to achieve greater agility, easier provisioning and lower administrative costs.

NVM-Express isn’t new. Development on the interface, which provides lean and mean access to non-volatile memory, first came to light a decade ago, with technical work starting two years later through a work group that comprised more than 90 tech vendors.

Whether the servers running your company’s applications are on your developers’ desks, in your data center, or in your private cloud, the technologies inside the racks are what enable—or throttle—application speed, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness.

Flash storage has radically changed the IT landscape. While the most obvious benefit is improved application performance, Enterprise Strategy Group research shows flash users have experienced improved reliability and resource utilization, as well as reduced TCO.

Despite what you may have read, the biggest and most important meta-trend in the IT business isn’t cloud computing. It’s not so-called “digital transformation,” and it’s not big data analytics. Nor is it software-defined anything.

Flash, NVMe, and storage-class memory like Intel’s Optane are speeding up storage significantly, and they’re a good fit for the workloads that are driving the greatest demand for storage, such as containers, big data, machine learning, and hyperconverged infrastructure, all of which use file and object storage rather than the block storage of SANs.

32GB solid state drives (SSDs) are already sampling and 50TB and 100TB are expected next year. The new 3D NAND process, coupled with in-chip die stacking, is increasing the capacity per chip at a tearaway pace. New form factors are being checked out.

The latest release of a non-volatile memory interface and storage protocol emphasizes the enterprise shift to analytics, virtualization and other data-intensive workloads while riding the coat tails of the robust solid-state storage sector.

NVM Express, Inc., the organization that developed the industry standard NVM Express (NVMe™) specification for accessing solid-state drives (SSDs) on a PCI Express (PCIe®) bus as well as across Fabrics, today announced the completion and release of its NVMe 1.3 specification.

If we go back to 2009, the work to define NVM Express (NVMe) had just begun, and around that same time, Microsoft Azure made its first major purchase of Serial ATA (SATA) based solid-state drives (SSDs) to help accelerate its storage servers by offloading the storage commit log.

NVM Express, the special interest group behind the NVMe protocol, which enables significantly higher performance on flash-based storage devices, compared to the AHCI protocol, published the NVMe 1.3 specification.